


From Where She Stands

by LunaCatriona



Category: Holby City
Genre: F/F, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-06
Updated: 2017-03-06
Packaged: 2018-09-28 14:45:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10119350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LunaCatriona/pseuds/LunaCatriona
Summary: Serena's grief is for the dead. Bernie's is for the mother left behind. One-shot, heavy mentions of grief and recent storylines.





	

You watch her die.

You watch her turn off the machine. You watch her heart shatter as the child’s stops. And there is absolutely nothing you can do. It is what it is, and you can never change it, no matter how deafeningly your heart screams out that this needs to be reversed.

You watch her go home alone. You watch her push you out, and you can never quite understand what goes on in that head of hers. She says she needs to be alone, but you can’t shake the feeling that alone is the last thing she needs to be. If you were her, you wouldn’t want to be alone. But you are not her, and you have to remind yourself of that every so often. Her outlook is quite different to yours, and how she views her own soul is different to how you would see yours. Isn’t that part of why you fell in love in the first place?

You watch her drink. Every night. It’s endless. You open her desk drawer to find empty bottles of wine. And you know she’s heading down a dangerous path; you know she was fond of drink to begin with, and you know just how easy it would be for her to convert that fondness into an addiction. But it numbs her pain when you’re not there. When you can’t be there, because she will not allow it.

You watch her pour over the past. You see the photos for the hundredth time and you just know you will always remember those pictures, and the tears that fall on them. You’re almost jealous – can you honestly say you’ve ever had that with your own children? Each of these photos is connected to a memory, and that is why she breaks before them. But you only have photos as proof of an event. You are seldom found in a photograph with your children, and you weren’t behind the camera, either. Your photos are not attached to your memory. They’re attached to your absence. And she, unlike you, was not an absent parent. At least she was in the same country as her child.

You watch her pester her ex-husband. She’s judging him how he’s dealing with his grief, and she cannot understand why he’s not been left like this. Why he’s still functional. Why he’s gone on holiday. But she’s always told you that he’s workshy, so why wouldn’t he take time out? He’s simply not the type to work himself into the ground, no matter the circumstance. You hear her say he’s not taking it seriously. You try to explain that he is not her and she is not him, but it takes forever for her to hear it. You remind her he’s a recovering alcoholic, and that this is a relapse risk to him as well as a massive trauma, but she cannot see his pain. You pity her, because she has stopped seeing beyond her own torment.

You watch her take it out on a colleague, pushing the girl to her limit, to the point where she cannot cope any longer. To a point where neither of them can cope. And you know her well enough to know that you could tell her until you were blue in the face that her treatment of her junior is cruel, but the words will never reach her. It’s not because she’s not listening. It’s because she cannot hear you. It’s because yours is the voice of love. Yours is the voice that does not judge her, and she knows this. So you wait until another’s voice echoes yours. The voice of a professional superior, because she can never listen to a subordinate. She can’t even listen to an equal most of the time. You wait until he’s told about this grief-driven bullying. And he says it. Exactly everything you have said. But his voice is not yours. She heeds him. And though it’s frustrating that she never heard your cries for a ceasefire, you’re glad she heard someone.

You watch her try to get by. It hurts. She cannot live. She can only survive, for now, and life is a chore, not a pleasure. You know she’s stopped sleeping but you have no proof, because she’s started to send you home almost every night. She seems to have stopped the drinking, but at what cost? Was the wine the only thing that allowed her any rest? You’re not sure that your interference is doing any good, so you back off, offering only the assistance and support that seems to be needed and wanted. She’s still your world, your everything, but you cannot have all of her. Not just now. She’s in too much pain. She’s too busy trying to make sense of the parts of her you cannot heal.

You watch her soul break. The pieces fall from her in the form of tears and anger. You discover the worst of her. It’s everything you’ve ever dreaded. The worst of her is more terrible than you could ever have imagined. But you’re glad for knowing it. You know these fragments of her are horrible, cruel, angry, derisive, manipulative, bullying…but you love them anyway. They are a part of her, and you could never not love a part of her. It’s simply an alarm bell to you. The worst in her could only come out to play when she’s in unbearable agony. All you can do is try to implement damage control, even if there’s the risk that you’ll end up in the firing line.

You watch her lose her mind with grief. It’s up and down, and around every corner lies a hurdle. She becomes someone you don’t know. This woman who victimises others, who doesn’t hear you when you try to get some sense into her head, is not someone you’ve ever met. But it’s the same woman you fell in love with. And though you don’t always recognise the woman you hold in your arms, you love her. It’s still that heart you fell in love with; it just so happens to have broken.

You watch her die. On the inside, she is dying. And because you love her to the ends of the Earth, it kills you, too.


End file.
